That's what Japan is doing. It isn't working well. The main reason is that the people with decision making power in this scenario are all elders, meaning they share a pro-stagnation sociological profile. Fear of changes, basically. But changes keep happening regardless, which fragilizes the whole thing.

The linked article itself refers to the discussions about this. The academic consensus is that it definitely influenced the later development of racism proper as modernly understood, but saying it was racism doesn't fit, since it's based on Christian-based considerations about how (presumed) original sin interacts with the (presumed) deicide curse, these two with the (presumed) cleansing brought about by baptism, these three seen through the lens of a (presumed) propensity or lack thereof to political treason, and other similar nonsense, all linked a lot of other stuff mixing religon and politics. So it qualifies at best as pre-racism, and is within the scope of my first paragraph.

Quantity vs quality, in this case, is a false dichotomy. Curves of scientific-technological developments measured by, for example, patent filings over the centuries, track global population size. The reason for this is that the larger the population, the more people with talent for scientific and technological research are born, the more means they have to dedicate themselves to such pursuits due to economies of scale, and the larger the pool of extremely high-IQ individuals within this subset of the population who're responsible for the discoveries with the highest impact, all due to the long tails of the different normal distributions associated with these traits. Any downward change to these parameters will result in a slowdown of discoveries, which will in turn will result in a reduction in technological development, which in turn will result in economic stagnation, producing a vicious spiral.

There are, evidently, other factors involved, such as political and economic models that favor or hinder such developments. But these, too, are a factor of population size. A shrinking population results in disproportionately large pressure, by those who want to maintain their standard of living, in favor of strong policies enforcing the short-term status quo for themselves, with disregard for long-term effects, see e.g. Japan and South Korea. This kind of status quo-maintaining effort is almost invariably detrimental to novel scientific research, since it favors, at best, iterative improvement of what's already well-known, not actual novelty. So the problem is compounded.

The world may still manage to find an alternative model for producing a long tail of high-IQ individuals with the means to continue generating exponentially growing novelty research, but, right now, no such model exists, and expecting one to arise just because, out of the blue, over the next few decades, is part of the wishful thinking mentality I referred to before.

Before that, there were forms of discrimination based on ethnicity and religion, but not any kind of grouping of different ethnic groups under broad general categories based on their skin color. For example, a French person might deeply dislike an English person and consider them inferior, or a European Christian might consider an also European Jewish person inferior, that kind of thing.

The larger groupings we hear about nowadays came from what's now called the "New Biology" of the 18th century, which had started to catalog plants, animals, and people due to similarities and differences in their phenotypes. Skin color was a very clear phenotypical category for humans under that cataloging perspective. And it quickly got linked with other discourses, these political, that had started emerging a while before, in the 16th and 17th centuries, about national identities, colonial right of conquest, administrative organization of imperial conquests, and similar stuff, so it spread fast over the next few decades.

In the early 19th century, the whole thing had trickled from the elites down into the common people, and racism as we currently understand it went mainstream.

A fascinating detail in all this is that, when racism began spreading, it was opposed by most conservatives of the time, and embraced only by the then progressives due to being seen as modern and scientific, unlike the religious mumbo jumbo the conservatives believed in. As the saying goes, all that's needed for a progressive to become a conservative is to continue believing the same things as time passes, so when a 21st-century reactionary conservative defends racist ideas, he's being an 18th-century progressive whom an 18th-century actual conservative would most definitely look down at.

Immigration has precisely the purpose to keep the population growing and the economy with it. Without it, the economy stagnates and begins to shrink. Countries have to pick one of these options:

* Economic growth through higher birth rates.
* Economic growth through higher immigration.
* Economic shrinkage.

There's no known fourth option. There are some hypothetical alternatives based on wishful thinking. If a country tries one of these and it fails, it'll experience economic contraction exactly as if it had actively opted for it.

I provide more details in this other reply..

10 million people are sufficient if those people are reproducing. If they aren't, the population keeps shrinking. Maintaining their genetic diversity ends up not mattering much. For an imperfect analogy, contraceptive methods, including abortion, are to humans what antibiotics are to bacteria: populations "vulnerable to" condoms and the like lose in the natural selection competition, while those that "mutated" and gained "immunity to" condoms etc., by continuing to grow, replace them, becoming over time the majority, then almost totality, then totality, of the population.

As for your example involving numbers, that's incorrect. $2.88 million sounds like a lot, but if you look at, say, Botswana, $2.88 million of their currency buys almost nothing. Why? Because the concrete meaning of $2.88 million is "All_Stuff_in_the_Market times the number 2.88M divided by Total_Number". If All_Stuff shrinks, or Total_Number increases, or both, that 2.88M can buy less, and less. Or to put it another way, society experiences inflation. Any scheme you find to grow that number faster than the number others hold means that you get a higher percentage of All_Stuff, while those others experience a lower percentage.

Greater production can fix this, yes, but only if the growth rate of All_Stuff is consistently faster than that of Total_Number and is relatively well spread among the population (it won't help if a tiny slice of the population grabs most of All_Stuff). Can better technology cause that? Maaaaybe. That's the bet the optimists make. There's no guarantee it will. Right now, the only thing we know that, with absolute certainty, causes All_Stuff to grow faster than Total_Number, is population growth.

Hence, the elites of most countries facing this issue are opting for increased immigration. If the population started reproducing faster, immigration wouldn't be needed. Since they aren't, immigrants it is, at the pace necessary to keep All_Stuff growing faster than Total_Number, which is to say, under acceleration.

The other alternative is the population learning to live with less, and less, offset a little thanks to advancements in technologies, but by no means completely. That is to say, the population accepting their progressive third-world-ization.

a) The pyramid shape of the Swiss population in 2050 will have something around 37% of the population not-working, being either children or retirees. This means 37% of the material production of every working person, at the very minimum, will go to sustaining non-working persons. Basically, two persons produce the goods and services consumed by three people. A minimum wealth transfer of this size is hard for a working population to keep.

Notice that it's indifferent how those 37% are distributed from working to non-working. Whether in the form of private savings, or of State-managed retirement, or a mix, or whatever, those are all just so many manners to spread what a country concretely makes between its population. How imaginary numbers in this or that database are organized doesn't change the baseline reality, all those numbers say is that this person has a claim to this percentage of the total available at that moment in time.

b) The reduction in housing and other prices will be offset by the much higher consumption of goods and services from non-working people.

c) About crimes, maybe. The statistics aren't clear on that.

d) Whether they want it or not is indifferent. Since their population will continue declining, with the rate of non-working retirees consuming a higher and higher percentage of everything that's produced leaving less and less for the working population, the economy will slowly but constantly convert Switzerland into a third world country. Once it's weak enough, populations with high birth rates will take over the more and more empty territory.

Right now (this may change), high birth populations are Sub-Saharan Africans, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish and "quiver" Evangelical Chuches in the US, and a few other orthodox groups in the Middle East. If things proceed as they are, these are the groups that will inherit Earth, including all of Europe and North America.

That's neither good nor bad, it just is.

e) Racism is a cultural invention as any other culture. It was invented in the 18th century, is still going on, and as any other cultural thing, will eventually die as every culture eventually does.

In regard to success or failure of a population, a racist culture held by its members may improve or reduce survival rates. If the racist population is big enough and has other traits that promote birth rates, it will grow. If its small, it will shrink due to lack of enough families and eventually die off. Supposing it grows, depending on the genetic configuration of that population, it may become weak toward illnesses that more genetically diverse populations would develop natural resistance to, and die off due to a plague.

The way things are, Switzerland seems poised to have a combination of low birth rates, low genetic variation, and racism, which all put together prevents them from fixing their decline. That will merely accelerate their extinction, and that of their culture with them.

It doesn't. Birth rates continue low regardless. The culture changed into one that favor having few children, and barring everyone converting to a religion that has as a core commandment families having tons of children, that won't change.

Also, I looked into the projection for the Swiss population in 2050, and it's predicted to be less than 10 million people already, and past 2050 the population is predicted to start declining. In other words, this referendum makes no difference, and the party that proposed it very likely knows as much, which is probably why they chose that number.

Analogies with the human brain don't work that well. In our case, every time we remember we rewrite that memory, altering it from slightly, to a lot, to completely. AI systems' baseline memory is read-only; it doesn't change during reuse, so it can be equated more with the way saving a PNG into a JPEG is still a direct derivative copy of the PNG content, no matter whether one cranks the compression up so the resulting image becomes way blurrier than the original. Being blurry doesn't make it not a copy. And, in being a copy, legal copying rights apply.

Now, if AI memory startes changing globally every single time it receives a request from any source, no matter how many sessions or API calls are happening, so that any new subsequent call is dealing with that altered memory and in turn altering it, so that its entire memory space is in constant flux, and there's no snapshotting to roll its state back to previous configurations, so they don't act as mere static lossy compressors, then it becomes an analog of a human brain with human-like memory, at which point accusing it of simply making derivative copies cannot be done anymore without also accusing humans.

The problem with that, evidently, is that when they start working like that, since they're functioning exactly as real persons do, they too become persons, with legitimate claim to personhood and to personal rights. Which is a legal can of worms no one wants to deal with.

VPN usage can be detected via deep packet inspection, as China shows. In China, the government is aware of all VPN usage and lets it slip, or blocks it, as they see fit. In Xinjiang they even went after VPN users to demand look into their mobile devices to check whether they had forbidden content there, not due to need but as an intimidation tactic, an explicit "we know who you are, and where to find you" warning to all inhabitants so they wouldn't feel empowered by the mere fact the government is allowing them to use VPNs.

The UK and other countries are looking into regulating VPNs by demanding that VPN providers also age-verify users. Those who don't will be formally fined, as the UK is trying to fine 4chan despite being unable to collect, and blocked, which is feasible. Evidently, VPN developers keep improving their protocols to make them more and more indistinguishable, but DPI also improves in return. It'll be a cat-and-mouse game as the one I described in my answer to the other reply, until using an unlicensed VPN provider becomes so aggravating that most will give up.

And, important tidbit, China resells its Great Firewall tech to any country interested. Right now, only dictatorships and illiberal democracies buy it, but if VPN tech improves faster than national age-verification legal bodies can keep up with via their own locally developed DPI solutions, they too may start purchasing it.

What I think is happening is that governments all around the world are seeing Big Wars brewing on the horizon, and preparing by having extensive media control mechanisms in place for when those turn into reality.

See, one thing a country must do to have a chance of winning a war, or at least not losing it badly, is to have a population strongly aligned with the war effort. That alignment, in turn, needs the population to be fed, and to believe in, all the propaganda the government puts out about how the war is going. Conversely, the enemy country tries to undermine that with counter-propaganda to reduce the other side's morale.

Back when a small group of media companies produced information, it was easy to control the flow of information for propaganda purposes. With the Internet that doesn't work, both propaganda, counter-propaganda, and opinions that are neither and go against both, flow in all directions. That's great when things are peaceful, and everyone is just having fun, doing business with everyone else, and arguing about minor grievances, or even major ones but that don't lead to existential risks. But it's very, very bad when you need to win serious wars.

So my take is that everyone but the kitchen sink is using age verification to install the infrastructure needed for full-on control of information flow, using youth outrage to learn the bypass mechanisms the most engaged will find and use, and then closing those loopholes one by one, until only a tiny minority is able to do so. Then, if (when) the wars come, a flip of the switch will enable similar strict limits on everyone. And propaganda can then work as expected.

If that's the case, we'll see governments doubling and tripling down on it, no matter the costs to corporations. These will either adapt or adapt. Those who refuse, too bad for them, and for us who'd prefer otherwise.

The main ways age verification is being done are by following instructions while a video of one's face is recorded, by submitting a photo of a legally valid State or National ID the system knows how to process, or by submitting valid credit card data. A bot can do those, and it's relatively cheap for one-off cases, but it gets very expensive for any kind of mass use:

* Listening to instructions and generating a real-time video of an adult face that follows them requires a lot of processing power.
* An ID can usually be submitted only once per site, so one needs to purchase lots of valid IDs in the black market to generate fake ID photos, IDs that other people are also purchasing to do the same.
* And getting lots of valid credit data also requires purchasing it from black markets.

None of this is impossible to overcome for bot farms, but it increases their costs significantly, so they become less massive and thus less of a nuisance, especially for big sites that can afford layers upon layers of anti-fraud mechanisms for each of those methods. Also, using those methods would cause many such operations to move from being simple ToS violators into becoming full-on criminals, something that might discourage local bot operators who only want to spread spam, but don't want to become targets of the FBI or its international counterparts.

Do you know how US healthcare costs at least ten times more than in other countries?

Eliminate from "the system" all the middlemen, all the shenanigans, all the MBA'ing, and all the lobbied-for anti-healthcare laws, and you'll have a lot with which to train (for free) and hire (with excellent wages) more doctors.

Yes.

Next question?

Precisely. Even if one session is fed the explicit code and documents it, then the second session generates code ostensibly based on the documentation generated by the first without having been fed the original code explicitly, the AI underlying both sessions was itself trained on the original code, even if a previous version of it, and holds large chunks of it lossy-compressed within its internal weights, to the point that, with the proper prompting in an entirely unrelated third session, we can get it to reproduce parts of that original code, if not the entirety of it. The end result is thus a two-step derivative of the original: original -> weights-compressed version of the original (first derivation) -> reimplementation based on that weights-compressed derivative version (second derivation).

For this to be true clean room one would need to entirely train a coding AI with everything it needs to become good enough except for the packages they want a clean-room implementation of, thus making sure there's absolutely nothing of that code anywhere within its weights. That AI would need to generate the documentation by being fed the completely novel (to it) code. Once that documentation was done, a completely clean state version of that AI would need to be started, no trace of the original code at all anywhere close to it or in its weights, then fed the documentation to code from it. Then, and only then, this code would be a true clean room implementation of that code.

Right now, that full special training from scratch for every set of packages one would want to clean room would be exorbitantly expensive, way more than paying two human teams to do the clean room implementation the old-fashioned way, so no one would really want to do it.